You may recognize these women, hiding in plain sight

She is 55, broke and tired of trying to keep up appearances. Faking normal is wearing her out.To
look at her, you wouldn’t know that her electricity was cut off last
week for non-payment or that she meets the eligibility requirements for
food stamps. Her clothes are still impeccable, bought in the good times
when she was still making money.

A Grace Note of Panic

But if you paid attention, you would see the sadness in her eyes, hear that grace note of panic in her otherwise commanding voice.

These
days, she buys the $1.99 10-ounce “trial size” jug of Tide to make ends
meet. You didn’t know laundry detergent came in that size.

You
invite her to the same expensive restaurants the two of you have always
enjoyed, but she orders mineral water with a twist of lemon, instead of
the $12 glass of Chardonnay. She is frugal in her menu choices,
meticulous, counting every penny in her head. She demurs dividing the
table bill evenly to cover desserts, designer coffees and the second and
third glasses of wine she didn’t drink.

Nest Egg: Gone Long Ago

She lives without cable, a gym membership and nail appointments. She’s discovered she can do her own hair.

There
are no retirement savings, no nest egg; she exhausted that long ago.
There is no expensive condo from which to draw equity and no husband to
back her up.

Months of slow pay and no pay have decimated her credit.
Bill collectors call constantly, reading verbatim from a script,
expressing polite sympathy for her plight — before demanding payment
arrangements that she can’t possibly meet.

When the Phone Stops Ringing

Friends
wonder privately how someone so well-educated could be in economic free
fall. After all, she is still as talented as ever and smart as a whip.
But work is sketchy now, mostly on-and-off consulting gigs. You can’t
remember when she had a real job. She has learned how to appear engaged,
but her phone doesn’t ring with opportunities anymore.

She doesn’t remember exactly when it stopped.

But she has entered the uncertain world of formerly and used to be and isn’t sure anymore where she belongs.

What she does know is that dozens of online job applications she’s filled out seem to have disappeared into a black hole. She’s convinced that employers have set their online job recruitment algorithms to reject anyone who graduated before 1995.

The people who are concerned about their children's safety from child
molestation should worry a lot less about transgender folks using
restrooms and more about their clergy. Every week there is a story
about some child molesting clergy member or other. Why those stories
are so common comedians make jokes about them.

ALBANY
— Not leaving it to divine chance, the state Catholic Conference has
turned in recent years to some of Albany’s most well-connected and
influential lobby firms to help block a bill that would make it easier
for child sex abuse victims to seek justice.

The Catholic
Conference, headed by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, has used Wilson Elser
Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker, Patricia Lynch & Associates, Hank
Sheinkopf, and Mark Behan Communications to lobby against the Child Victims Act as well as for or against other measures.

All
told, the conference spent more than $2.1 million on lobbying from 2007
through the end of 2015, state records show. That does not include the
conference’s own internal lobbying team.Filings show the
lobbyists were retained, in part, to work on issues associated with
“statute of limitations” and “timelines for commencing certain civil
actions related to sex offenses.” Other issues included parochial school
funding and investment tax credits.

“They are willing to spend
limitless money in order to basically keep bad guys from being
accountable for their actions,” said Melanie Blow, chief operations
officer of the Stop Abuse Campaign. “I think they’re doing it because
they don’t want to have to pay out settlements.”

Added Kathryn
Robb, an advocate and survivor who says she was abused by her brother as
a 9-year-old: “If they need to spend that much money on lobbying,
clearly, then, they have some pretty big secrets to hide.”

While a
far cry from the millions in lobbying top special interests spend in
Albany each year, advocates for child sex abuse survivors say the $2.1
million spent likely represents a worthwhile investment to the Catholic
Conference if it can continue to block legislation that would eliminate
the statute of limitations on child sex abuse civil cases and open a
one-year window to bring lawsuits for victims who can no longer sue
under current law.

The
demise of unions, the miserly minimum wage and the absence of an
economic fairness movement add up to a dark future for many.

As
a union-side lawyer I hate when people ask that question as if it’s my
problem and not theirs. You’d think with tears in our eyes we’d embrace
each other and say: “My God, what should we do?” It’s a question now not
of bringing back “labor” but of bringing back the middle class. And
neither you nor I have done enough on that.

In 40 years as a labor
lawyer, I’ve yet to figure it out—and now? “You and I are done,” said
Ed, who’s my age. “It’s up to younger people to figure it out.”

Well, I’m not done. With my 401(k), I have to keep going.

The other day I spoke to the guy at T. Rowe Price: “What do you think? Should I be in bonds? Maybe I should preserve capital?”

He seemed astonished. “You—preserve capital? You still need growth.”

I’m
65 and I still need growth. That’s why at this point in my life the
collapse of labor is something personal. When I was younger, I thought
of it as a problem for other people. But as I get older, I realize: I
should have either saved more or made sure there was a labor movement to
protect me. As it is, even Barack Obama seems ready to cut my Social
Security.

It scares me how many of my friends are scrambling
harder than ever. Here’s what one told me: “I thought when the kids were
gone, my wife and I would have it easy. But somehow both of us seem to
be working harder than ever. Those violin lessons I imagined I’d be
taking in the morning? Forget it. It’s as if someone shows up and shouts
in your ear: ‘Fine, your kids are gone, they’re all through college,
great—NOW GET TO WORK!’ ”

With no labor movement, no pension, what’s to become of us? And we’re, relatively, well off!At Starbucks I wince when the little old white-haired lady behind the counter says, “Can I start something for you?”

Start
an IRA, for both of us. Only she and I know it’s too late. At least
she’s working. I have friends my age who have no pension, nothing, and
know they will never work again. They hope so, but ...“There
should be a March on Washington,” said my friend Tony, “for all us guys,
over 60, who know we’ll never find a real job again.”

It’s the
last act for us: old guys, marching, like the Bonus Army in the
Depression. Perhaps, as in the 1930s, General MacArthur will send in
horse soldiers to sweep us away—all of us tottering baby boomers who
were never in a war.

Of course it’s for the young I feel sorry:
after all, it was on our watch that a labor movement disappeared. Am I
wrong or do they seem intimidated? So far as I can tell, at least on the
El, they seem to shrink from one another. They stare pitifully down at
their iPhones, which stare up pitilessly at them. Their own gadgetry
sits in judgment of them.

But why pick on them? Everyone seems
demoralized. In my practice, I long ago came to accept that when labor
disappeared, I’d stop seeing union members. But now they are not even
“employees.” More and more I have clients who have signed away their
rights to be considered “employees” at all—which means there’s no
minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, no Social Security, nothing. Years ago
they should have said something when the HR people said: “You’re no
longer employees here—but cheer up, you’ll go on working for us as
independent contractors.” In one case we have, the boss even made the
guys set up their own personal “corporations,” as in “John Smith,
Incorporated.” Then HR says: “We don’t pay you, John Smith, but John
Smith, Incorporated.” My friends ask: “How can people live on the
minimum wage?” But as an independent contractor, John Smith,
Incorporated, doesn’t even make the minimum wage. Sometimes I think: one
day, every American worker will be a John Smith, Incorporated, every
cleaning lady, every janitor, every one of us—it will be a nation of
CEOs in chains. “How did I let this happen?”

A new Pew Research Center analysis
of General Social Survey data confirms a long-simmering trend in U.S.
religious observance: While attendance at religious services has
declined for all Americans, it has declined more among women then men.

In
the early 1970s, 36 percent of women and 26 percent of men reported
attending church services weekly, a ten-point gap that reflected the
long-standing trend of women being more religiously committed than men.

The
gap reached its widest point in 1982, when it hit 13 percent, but then
it began to shrink. By 2012, 22 percent of men reported attending church
weekly, as did 28 percent of women, reflecting a “worship gap” of only
six percent, an historic low.

Pew’s David McClendon gives several
possible reasons for women’s declining levels of religiosity as measured
by church attendance. One is the increase in the number of women in the
workforce, which could theoretically decrease their leisure time and
force them to cut back on activities like church.

But as McClendon
himself notes, “the fastest increase in women’s full-time employment”
actually “occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time
the gender gap on religious service attendance actually widened somewhat.”

If
women aren’t too busy with work to go to church, maybe it’s because
they’re becoming too well educated. Higher rates of educational
attainment are correlated to less church going, except McClendon notes
that both more educated and less educated women are going to church
less.

Finally, McClendon notes that the growth of the “nones”
appears to having contributed to women’s declining church attendance, as
“the rate of growth in the unaffiliated has been slightly more rapid
for women than men,” which has “helped narrow the gender gap in weekly
attendance.”But it seems likely that more women becoming
unaffiliated is part and parcel of the same trend of more women staying
away from church. It still doesn’t explain why this is happening.

What
McClendon overlooks is that the years that women’s church attendance
began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the
Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the
culture wars, with overall attendance for women taking it’s first steep
drop in the 1980s.

This drop in church attendance for women
coincided with the period when the Catholic bishops began making
abortion a litmus test for Catholic politicians, as in the 1984 election
when Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro was attacked for being pro-choice.

And Pew’s own numbers
appear to back this up. According to Pew, women are slightly more
likely than men to say that churches should keep out of politics (55
percent vs. 53 percent), and overall 60 percent of Catholics say church
should keep out of politics.

Women’s church attendance did recover
somewhat in the early 1990s, but then began a long slide in the
mid-1990s that continued to 2012, when the GSS data end. While the GSS
numbers don’t break out attendance by religion, church attendance for
both men and women appears to have bottomed out around the time the sex
scandals broke in the Catholic Church in 2001. Other studies have a
found “a significant decline
in religious participation as a result of the scandals,” and it’s
possible this decline was large enough to affect overall church
attendance.

This
is a report about junk science and some of the people who propagate it.
It is not about silly, perhaps amusing theories about ESP or life on
the moon or even purported miracle cures for cancer. The “science”
examined here actively harms people, leading with grim regularity to
suicide, depression and an array of self-destructive behaviors. It
demeans, defames and defrauds human beings, typically at their most
vulnerable moments. And, as if that weren’t enough, it regularly lays
the blame for the alleged malady of homosexuality at the feet of gay
people’s parents, despite the fact that they are wholly innocent

Executive Summary

Will
standing in a circle of naked men deep in the woods turn gay men
straight? Is disrobing in front of a mirror alone with your therapist
and then touching “your masculinity” a cure for homosexuality? Does
beating a pillow representing your mother really help develop “healthy”
relationships with other men?

The men and women who people this
industry known as “conversion,” “reparative” or “ex-gay” therapists are
like modern-day phrenologists, the “experts” beloved by the Nazis who
thought they could identify inferior human beings by measuring their
subjects’ skulls. They employ theories that have been thoroughly
debunked by virtually all relevant medical associations. They cite
bizarre studies that were shot down decades ago as key documents. They
use techniques that were described in court by one expert as “worse than
snake oil.” They are quacks.

Many of them are doubtless sincere.
Some describe their own struggles with “unwanted same-sex attractions.”
But sincere or not, the promotion of conversion therapy has a cynical
side. If being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is merely a chosen
behavior, one that can be “fixed” with the right mental health
treatment, then criticizing LGBT people for their sexual choices is akin
to simply criticizing bad behavior. Unlike attacking someone for their
skin color, reparative therapists can condemn the gay “lifestyle” and
still claim that they are not LGBT-hating bigots.

The real science
is perfectly clear. A consensus of the vast majority of psychiatrists,
psychologists and other counselors and their professional organizations
agree that homosexuality is a normal variation of human sexuality.
Likewise, they condemn reparative therapy and other attempts to change
sexual orientation.

This report is built around revelations that
emerged from a lawsuit that was tried in New Jersey last year.
Represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and other
attorneys, several gay plaintiffs sued Jews Offering New Alternatives
for Healing, or JONAH (formerly Jews Offering New Alternatives to
Homosexuality), under a state consumer fraud law.

The case did not
go well for JONAH. The judge in the case barred almost all testimony
from the six experts proffered by the defendants, saying that “the
theory that homosexuality is a disorder is not novel but like the notion
that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it instead is
outdated and refuted.” In the end, the plaintiffs won a hands down
victory and JONAH went out of business. But in depositions and the trial
itself, the creepy world of reparative therapy was laid bare.

Nude
group exercises and one-on-one therapy, re-enactments of past sexual
abuse, group cuddling, and counseling blaming parents were normal.
Bizarre practices included using anti-LGBT slurs, basketballs and even a
pair of oranges representing testicles. Plaintiffs were told that
living as gay men would reduce their lifespans, subject them to terrible
diseases, and ensure miserable lives.

The practice of reparative
therapy, which one expert estimates has been administered to one in
three LGBT youths in recent years, is unconscionable, particularly when
it is forced on young people by parents who are often trying to do what
they think is best for their children. A number of experts have shown
clearly that such therapy is unethical and utterly counterproductive.

My
entire life, I’ve been told to fear you in one way or another. I’ve
been told to cover my body as to not distract you in school, to cover my
body to help avoid unwanted advances or comments, to cover my body as
to not tempt you to sexually assault me, to reject your unwanted
advances politely as to not anger you. I’ve been taught to never walk
alone at night, to hold my keys in my fist while walking in parking
lots, to check the backseat of my car, to not drink too much because you
might take advantage of me. I’ve been told what I should and shouldn’t
do with my body as to not jeopardize my relationships with you.

I’ve
been warned not to emasculate you, to let “boys be boys,” to protect
your fragile ego and to not tread on your even more fragile masculinity.
I’ve been taught to keep my emotions in check, to let you be the unit
of measure for how much emotion is appropriate and to adjust my emotions
accordingly. I’ve been taught that you’re allowed to categorize women
into mothers/sisters/girlfriends/wives/daughters but any woman outside
of your protected categories is fair game.

So
to those of you who think you’re being helpful by “protecting” me and
my fellow women, you’re like a shark sitting in the lifeguard chair. I
wasn’t uncomfortable until you showed up at the pool and the only
potential predator I see is you.

Your
mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives and daughters don’t need you to
walk them to the bathroom for safety. Your fathers, brothers, friends
and sons need to walk themselves away from their own double standards.
Women are sexually harassed and sexually assaulted on school campuses,
on the street, at their jobs, on the Internet, in their own homes, in
ANY public place. And it has been excused or ignored for so long because
of what you and I are taught from the first years of our interactions
with each other: You, as a male, are not accountable for your own
actions. It’s MY responsibility, as a female, to not “provoke” you. But
then you get to knight-in-shining-armor your way through life for those
in your protected categories and I am expected to applaud you. Why the
outrage now over bathrooms? Why aren’t you outraged every single day?

If
you’re telling me that there are high volumes of boys and men out
there, in schools or in general, who are just waiting for a “loop-hole”
to sexually assault girls and women, we have bigger problems on our
hands than bathrooms. The first problem would be your apparent lack of
knowledge of how often it happens OUTSIDE of bathrooms, with no “loop
holes” needed. This isn’t about transgender bathroom access. This is
about you not trusting the boys and men in your communities and/or
fearing that they’re all secretly predators. Why do you have this fear?
How many fathers have panicked when their daughters started dating
because they “know how teenage boys can be because they used to be one”?
How many times have girls been warned “boys are only after one thing”? A
mother can bring her young son into the women’s restroom and that’s
fine but a father bringing his young daughter into the men’s restroom is
disturbing because men are assumed to be predators and “little girls”
shouldn’t be exposed to that.

So
instead of picking up your sword and heading to Target or the girls’
locker room to defend our “rights,” why don’t you start somewhere that
could actually make a difference? Challenge your children’s schools to
end sexist dress codes and dress codes that sexualize girls as young as
age 5. Advocate for proper (or any) sex education classes in all public
schools by a certain grade level. Focus more on teaching your sons not
to rape vs teaching your daughters how to avoid being raped. Stop asking
“How would you feel if that was your mother or sister?” It shouldn’t
take the comparison to clue you in to what’s right or wrong. Question
why you’re more worried about your daughter being around men than your
son being around women in bathrooms and dressing rooms. Stop walking by
Victoria’s Secret with no problem but covering your son’s eyes if a
woman is breastfeeding in public. Stop treating your daughter’s body as
some fortress you’re sworn to protect as if that’s all she’s got to
offer the world.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

From The Los Angeles Times:http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0515-thomas-title-vii-evolution-20160515-story.htmlBy Gillian ThomasMay 16, 2016he
Department of Justice last week threw down the gauntlet in North
Carolina, filing a lawsuit alleging that the state violated federal
anti-discrimination laws by restricting trans individuals' access to
bathrooms in state government buildings. One of those federal laws,
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, forbids employment
discrimination because of race, color, national origin, religion – and
sex. DOJ says that North Carolina has engaged in sex discrimination,
because, in DOJ's view, “sex” includes “gender identity.”

The
government's interpretation of that word — “sex” — has broadened
significantly since Title VII's passage. Indeed, the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by Title VII and
vested with primary enforcement authority for the statute, initially
understood “because of sex” to mean no more than overt disadvantages to
women in favor of men, and showed no interest in enforcing the provision
at all. It's taken decades for the legal understanding of sex to arrive
at where it is today, and it's a progression that maps, and mirrors,
our cultural understanding of sex as more than just biology.———————“Sex”
was added to Title VII's list of protected characteristics at the last
minute by Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, an avowed opponent of the Civil
Rights Act. Although Smith was, incongruously, a longtime supporter of
the Equal Rights Amendment, his jocular tone during much of the floor
debate on the sex amendment suggested that he was less than serious
about winning its adoption. (Historians have come to believe that Smith
likely was sincere, if only because he feared that an employment rights
bill that protected against race but not sex discrimination would place
white women at a disadvantage in the workplace.) The amendment
ultimately passed, but not without a good deal of bemused commentary
from House members — only 12 of whom were women — at the notion that
women should stand on equal footing in the workplace.

The
unceremonious addition of “sex” to Title VII prompted a dismissive
attitude among the EEOC's leadership. When a reporter at a press
conference asked Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., the agency's first Chair,
“What about sex?” he had only a joke for an answer. “Don't get me started,” he said. “I'm all for it.” Another of the agency's first leaders wrote off the Title VII sex provision as a “fluke” that was “born out of wedlock.”Not surprisingly, then, although fully one-third of the charges filed with the EEOC in its first year of existence alleged sex discrimination,
the agency was slow to articulate what illegal discrimination “because
of sex” even meant. It waffled, for instance, on whether to sanction job
ads that were separated into “help wanted — male” and “help wanted —
female,” or the airline industry's widespread rules that female flight
attendants couldn't be married, over the age of 30 or pregnant.But
thanks to pressure from feminist lawyers within the EEOC, as well as
forces outside it — notably the National Organization for Women, founded
in part to protest the agency's cavalier Title VII enforcement — the
agency began to right itself.

In 1968, it ruled that
sex-segregated ads violated Title VII, and that flight attendants should
not be subject to marriage and age restrictions. In 1972, it updated
its “Guidelines on Discrimination Because of Sex” to prohibit pregnancy
discrimination and sex-differentiated terms in employer pension plans.
In even later versions of the Guidelines, the EEOC disapproved “fetal
protection policies” that disqualified women from jobs that involved
exposure to dangerous chemicals, declared bias against workers with
caregiving responsibilities to be a form of sex discrimination, and
adopted a definition of pregnancy discrimination that imposed robust
obligations on employers to accommodate pregnant employees' physical
limitations.

Last
week, some students at University of Chicago, where I attend, proposed a
resolution to our College Council to divest from Chinese weapons
manufacturers, in protest of China’s severe human rights abuses and its long-standing occupation of Tibet.

Members
of the council were quick to condemn the resolution, and for good
reason. The members noted it was political, and disrespectful to Chinese
students. Other members noted that Chinese students should be given
time to respond to the presenters with a counter-presentation. One
representative even suggested that the College Council issue an apology
to Chinese students for even considering the resolution. The resolution
was tabled indefinitely.

Curiously, when a few weeks earlier the
same College Council passed a nearly identical resolution condemning
Israel, no one suggested an apology. These same representatives argued
why it was their moral imperative to condemn Israel. They were
determined to push this through at all costs, and despite requests, they
didn’t even offer the other side an opportunity to present.

Over
the past few weeks I have been told that Jews “don’t count” as a
minority. I have been accused of using anti-semitism to justify
oppression. All I want to know is why my campus doesn’t treat
anti-semitism with the same rigor with which it treats any other forms
of bias.

When Jews stood before the council, and asked
that it recognize the Jewish right to self-determination, a basic right
for all people, people in the room laughed. One representative noted
that “If we were to affirm the right to Jewish self-determination … it
takes away from the intent of the resolution”.

Students in the
room that day called us racists and murderers and “apartheid
supporters”, for even thinking we, as Jews, could have a voice in the
discussion over the one small state we call our own. A Jewish student
was chided “You are racist and you are against me and my family’s
existence”. It was uncivil, and unproductive, but the council-members
did not once that day condemn the personal nature of these attacks, or
defend the rights of the opposition to make their case.

At one
point, a student questioned the presenters, members of Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP), about their organization allegedly holding a
moment of silence for Palestinians who were killed while trying to
murder Jewish Civilians. One of the presenters confirmed the moment,
then responded without missing a beat “Palestinians have a right to
honor their martyrs”.

If the killing of any other ethnic group had
been celebrated, the University would make grief counselors available.
It would send out mass emails of condemnation. They would suspend the
organization responsible, and possibly the students involved in it. The
organization would certainly not have any credibility to present to the
student government. Since the victims were Jews though, their
celebration of murder went unchallenged. The representatives never even
brought the issue up.

On the third slide of the presentation in
favor of the resolution, presenters claimed that voting against the
resolution would mean “maintaining a system of domination by Jews”. The
presenters were relying on one of the most common, long-standing,
overtly anti-semitic tropes to make their case, and our representatives said nothing.

Party
members assumed they were the good guys, incapable of prejudice. But
now Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah have laid bare the left’s capacity for
racism

Actually,
you’re just like a concentration camp guard. You’re just doing it
because you’re paid to, aren’t you?” If you’re Jewish, and live in
London, you might dimly recall those words. But if not, here’s a clue. They were spoken to a Jewish reporter a decade ago by the man who today indignantly described himself
as having fought a lifelong battle against discrimination – shortly
before being suspended from the Labour party for potentially bringing it
into disrepute with clumsy references to Hitler.

Rereading the transcript of that 2005 exchange between Ken Livingstone
and a hapless Evening Standard reporter today, what takes the breath
away isn’t the rather tasteless suggestion from London’s then mayor that
anyone working for a paper whose owners he disliked was probably “a
German war criminal” in a previous life. It’s that when the reporter
explained he was Jewish and was offended by the Nazi reference,
Livingstone didn’t stop. He doubled down on the concentration camp
stuff, took his spade and kept digging. And he got away with it. There
were calls for his resignation, of course, but he got away with it.

He
carried on being mayor for another two years, and has carried on ever
since being feted by people who would have bayed for the blood of any
Tory making racially insensitive remarks to a black reporter. He went on
blithely to suggest that Jews have stopped voting Labour
because they’re rich, and still didn’t really seem to see what the
problem was; but then, he was surrounded by people who didn’t seem to
want to see the problem either.

And that’s one explanation for how
a politician as naturally gifted as Livingstone could ever think it a
good idea to summon Hitler as a witness for the defence, when defending
his party against allegations of antisemitism.

Perhaps he has
simply lost sight of how it looks, outside the circles – once fringe,
now mainstream in the Labour party – in which he moves. You could see
today’s extraordinary day of bloodletting – which saw first the
suspension of the Labour MP Naz Shah
for pre-election Facebook posts suggesting Israel be forcibly
transported to the US, and then that of Livingstone for only making
matters worse – simply as payback for all the times someone got away
with it. Fail to challenge dubious attitudes and they quickly seep into
the mainstream.

But there is another possible explanation,
and that’s the belief found close to many left wing hearts that they,
and they alone, are the good guys – the champions of equality and
fairness – and therefore incapable of prejudice. They don’t need to
question their assumptions, or take a long hard look in the mirror,
because the racists are the other guys.

As Ken explained
in injured tones to the BBC’s Martha Kearney today, real racism is when
you’re rude to your neighbour’s face in Stoke Newington, which he’d
never do. And anyway, racists would hardly be attracted to Labour, would
they? To which one could almost hear his colleagues screaming at the
radio; well if they weren’t before, mate, they might now.

The
row over Ken Livingstone and Labour antisemitism has exposed people who
think they’re anti-racist – but make a curious exception for Jews

Let’s
imagine for just a moment that a small but vocal section of the left
was consumed with hatred for one faraway country: barely an hour could
pass without them condemning it, not just for this or for that policy,
but for its very existence, for the manner of its birth, for what it
represented. And now let’s imagine that this country was the only place
in the world where the majority of the population, and most of the
government, were black.

You’d expect the racist right to hate such
a country. But imagine it was that noisy segment of the left that
insisted it would be better if this one black country had never been
created, that it was the source of most of the conflict in its region,
if not the world. That its creation was a great historical crime and the
only solution was to dismantle it and the people who lived there should
either go back to where they – or rather, their grandparents or
great-grandparents – had come from; or stay where they were and, either
way, return to living as a minority once more. Sure, living as a
minority had over the centuries exposed them to periodic persecution and
slaughter. But living as a majority, in charge of their own destiny –
well, black people didn’t deserve that right.

And now imagine that
the people who said all these things insisted they had nothing against
black people. On the contrary, they were passionately against all forms
of racism. In fact it was their very anti-racism that made them hate
this one black country. Their objection was only to this country, its
conduct and its existence, not to black people themselves. You surely
were only inventing this horrible accusation of racism to divert
attention from the wicked black country and its multiple crimes.

Most
on the left would give such a view short shrift. They would be
suspicious of this insistence that loathing of the world’s only black
country was separate from attitudes to black people in general,
especially because most black people had a strong affinity with this
country, seeing it as a constitutive part of their own identity. The
left would not be swayed by the fact these critics could point to a
handful of black activists who shared their loathing of this country and
wished it gone. They would want to listen to the mainstream black
community and be guided by them.

I could keep going, but you get
the idea. Jews have watched the events of recent days with a weariness
that might surprise many, given how shocking they must seem: the sight
of Ken Livingstone suspended by the Labour party over antisemitism, along with the Bradford West MP, Naz Shah.
Weary because they have known of these attitudes, indeed warned that
they had found a warm space to incubate on the left, for many, many
years.

Monday, May 9, 2016

When
surveying the ill-informed, shoddy work that at times passes as
in-depth journalism regarding Islam these days, a rationalist may well
be tempted to slip into a secular simulacrum of John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond.
In reputable press outlets, articles regularly appear in which the
author proceeds from an erroneous premise through a fallacious argument
to a fatuous conclusion. Compound all this — especially in the main
case I’m about to discuss, that of the British former Islamist turned
reformer, Maajid Nawaz — with the apparent intent to defame or cast
aspersions, and you get worthless artifacts of journalistic malfeasance
that should be dismissed out of hand, but that, given the seriousness of
the subject, nevertheless merit attention.

For starters, a few words about premises and some necessary background. Those who deploy the “stupid term” (see Christopher Hitchens)
“Islamophobia” to silence critics of the faith hold, in essence, that
Muslims deserve to be approached as a race apart, and not as equals, not
as individual adults capable of rational choice, but as lifelong
members of an immutable, sacrosanct community, whose (often highly illiberal) views must not be questioned, whose traditions (including the veiling of women) must not be challenged, whose scripturally inspired violence must be explained away as the inevitable outcome of Western interventionism in the Middle East or racism and “marginalization” in Western countries.

Fail to exhibit due respect for Islam — not Muslims as people, Islam — and you risk being excoriated, by certain progressives,
as an “Islamophobe,” as a fomenter of hatred for an underprivileged
minority, as an abettor of Donald Trump and his bigoted policy
proposals, and, most illogically, as a racist.

Islam, however, is
not a race, but a religion — that is, a man-made ideological construct
of assertions (deriving authority not from evidence, but from
“revelation,” just as Christianity and Judaism do) about the origins and
future of the cosmos and mankind, accompanied by instructions to
mankind about how to behave. Those who believe in Islam today may — and some do — reject it tomorrow. (Atheism has, in fact, been spreading in the Muslim world.)

Calling
the noun Islamophobia “sinister,” Ali A. Rizvi, a Canadian
Pakistani-born physician and prominent figure among former Muslims in
North America, told me via Skype recently that the word “actually takes
the pain of genuine victims of anti-Muslim bigotry and uses that pain,
it exploits it for the political purpose of stifling criticism of
Islam.” In fact, denying Islam’s role in, for instance, misogynist
violence in the Muslim world, said Rizvi, is itself racist and
“incredibly bigoted, because you’re saying that it’s not these ideas and
beliefs and this indoctrination [in Islam] that cause” the
“disproportionately high numbers of violent, misogynistic people in
Muslim majority countries, it’s just in their DNA.”

Also, remember
that Islam claims jurisdiction not just over its followers, but over us
all, with a message directed to humanity as a whole. Which means Islam
should be susceptible to critique by all. People, whatever their faith
(or lack thereof) deserve respect; their ideologies? Not necessarily.
In fact, the cornerstone of any free society is freedom of expression –
a freedom impeded by labeling as “phobic” those who would object to an
ideology.

I've been using "they" and "their" as both singular and plural
pronouns since the 1970s when I rebeled against the use of "he" and
"his" as the supposedly gender neutral singular pronoun. When I was
told that a pronoun couldn't be both singular and plural I responded,
"You must be kidding, as "you" and "your" are regularly used that way.

You only need four letters to take a stand against the prejudice embedded in the English language

I
got in trouble over a four-letter word the other day. None of the ones
you are thinking of: it was “they” that caused a fracas that Jeremy
Clarkson would have been proud of.

At the start of 2016, the good folks of the American Dialect Society got together to crown their Word of the Year.
They (see what I’m doing here) have decided that the word could now be
used as a singular pronoun, flexing the English language so a plural
could denote a singular, genderless, individual.

They has long
been used in the singular in English, but not to denote genderlessness.
One of the earliest examples comes from Geoffrey Chaucer in 1395, who
wrote in The Pardoner’s Tale: “And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up…” Shakespeare followed in 1594, in The Comedy of Errors: “There’s
not a man I meet but doth salute me/As if I were their well-acquainted
friend”. It took a few centuries for they to pop up in reference to
women: Jane Austen uses they in the singular 75 times in Pride and
Prejudice (1813) and as Rosalind muses in 1848’s Vanity Fair: “A person
can’t help their birth.”

Around 1809, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
rejected “he” as the generic pronoun (“in order to avoid particularising
man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently”, he
wrote in his notebooks), settling on “it” as an ideal, neutral solution.
Roughly around the same time, the philosopher John Stuart Mill was struggling to define the philosophy of language itself:
what we could know – if anything – beyond our language? Mill came to
the conclusion that language tells us what is thinkable, possible; so,
if a young woman never sees the word “she” or “they”, could she
naturally know that “he” represented her, too? No. In this sense, women
were inherently excluded.

Growing up almost two centuries later, I
was just supposed to understand that language excluded me because I was
a girl: I was out, except when it came to naming hurricanes and
referring to ships. I was once told as a kid that all hurricanes were
female because women were so destructive; a barbed comment I never
questioned because at the time I already sensed some things were easier
if you were a boy.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson